Umasking Potential
by UncommonNonsenseSEM
Summary: The unmasking scene, if I were Christine. Mix of Leroux, Kay, and ALW. Christine is a bit OOC.


This is sort of how I wish the unmasking scene had gone. How it possibly would have, if I were Christine. In this version, Christine is a little older (I see her as about 20 in my version), more mature, wiser, more daring. The Erik is my version is a mix of Leroux and Kay, though the scene is heavily ALW. I have included some of the lyrics into the dialogue, but I've tried to make them more like conversation than song lyrics.. I hope I succeeded. Absolutely a T rating. This is a one-shot. 

"Noooooo!"

The word was a drawn out wail of despair and agony, heart-rending to hear, mingling with the last echo of the cacophonous shattered chord he had played at the moment of his betrayal, his magnificent, ornate pipe organ joining his voice in the echoing and stentorian discord of his agony.

"Nooo! Oh, no... no, no, no!" Those long, clever hands of his had leapt from the organ's keys to hide the face that Christine had laid bare. In her own small hand, staring vacantly, accusingly up at her, was his mask. His mask. The black, full-face mask he wore nearly constantly, alternating it only with a white one of similar construction. It was his only safety and protection from a world that considered him freakish, repulsive, disgusting, and terrifying.

That stiff leather mask was his only way of hiding his abject hideousness from her. His only way of preserving the illusion that he was a normal man, a man worthy of her love. His only chance at happiness. And now, it was loosely grasped in the inert, frozen fingers of the beautiful girl he loved beyond reason, beyond even sanity.

"Damn you, Christine!" he roared. "Curse you, you little prying Pandora! You little vixen! You little lying Delilah!" His in-drawn breath was just as much a sob as the exhale that followed it. "You little viper! Now, you cannot ever be free! Oh, damn you! Curse you! Curse your curiosity, you little Hell-cat!"

Suddenly, his anger seemed to desert him. All that seemed left was his deep despair. His gaunt form seemed to draw in upon itself, his unusual height becoming less and less imposing. It seemed to Christine like he was trying to will himself to vanish completely, and she felt guilt crush her heart.

She stared at him, open-mouthed. In his headlong rush to leap from the organ's polished wooden bench, away from her betraying hand and her wide-eyed, terrified, gaping stare, he had knocked her roughly to the ground. She sat sprawled on the deep red and gold Aubusson rug, the shiny, stiff, black leather mask still clutched in her nerveless hand. Tears were coursing down her pale face, but she was silent, barely breathing as he raced to the corner of the vast, cavernous room, his repeated negations a broken wish for this to have never happened.

"Christine..."

His voice, once so powerful and beautiful that she had truly believed he was the unseen, celestial, holy and perfect Angel of Music her late father had promised to send to her, was barely more than a whisper, burdened with a despair so enormous that just hearing it tore at her heart.

"Oh Christine... Stranger than you dreamt it, isn't it?" He peered at her through the cage of his long, expressive fingers, hating himself for causing her pain, hating her for destroying his tiny chance of hope. Oh yes, he wanted to punish her for her damnable curiosity! Slowly, he moved his hands away from his face, revealing his uncovered abomination. When the terrified, heartbroken young woman gasped and recoiled, he grimaced and fresh tears coursed down his withered, ravaged cheeks. "Could you ever dare to look? Could you ever even bear to think of me now? I am not your angel... just a loathsome gargoyle who burns in this desolate underground hell..." He gestured weakly at his dark, subterranean home, five floors below street level, in the cellars of the Paris Opera, the opulent Palais Garnier "... but secretly yearns for the heaven of your voice, Christine".

On hands and knees, he crept closer, his emaciated form strange and spiderish in the flickering candlelight. His peculiar golden eyes had begun to glow with an unearthly manic intensity. "But, Christine..." his voice barely more than a whisper as he sought to convince himself just as much as her, "Fear can turn to love... Perhaps you will learn to see the man behind the monster, behind this accursed, repulsive carcass... I know I seem a beast, Christine... but secretly, oh... secretly, I dream of beauty..." His reflective eyes closed, and an expression of exhausted agony took over his cruelly deformed features.

With those skewering, aching eyes closed, she could study his poor face without the horrible mixture of fear, hate, desolation, agony, adoration, and accusation those weirdly back-lit eyes radiated tearing into her. She looked at him, truly, for the first time.

His poor face, she thought!

His skin was sallow and pale, the same shade as parchment, of bleached bone. It was thin and translucent, allowing his veins to show through; little meandering trails of blue that reminded her of rivers illustrated on a map. It was stretched tightly over a gaunt, cadaverous skull, his cheekbones, brows, and chin far too sharp and pronounced. Raw wounds bloomed at the points where the mask's pressure and weight made the most contact with those sharp areas, the thin skin relentlessly rubbed away by the mask's constant wear. Those wounds were red, festering, wet with weepy infection. It must be so painful to keep wearing that mask, she thought, as she took in the ruin before her.

There was no nose at all! Just a sharp little shard of bone, barely covered in tissue, forming the nasal bridge between his asymmetrical eyes. Where a nose should be... was just a hole! A black hole, showing the inside of his skull, the cavern of his nasal sinus! She could feel his uneven and shuddering breaths issuing from that dark cavern, warm and alive but still nearly sobs.

His left eye was in the normal, expected position, but his right was lower, the eye socket sunken deep and intruding upon the partly missing, partly jutting right cheekbone. The skin on that side was mottled and waxen, looking like it had been melted into itself. The layers of bone, muscle, nerve, and skin seemed to be blended unevenly, with layers of livid redness visible through the ashen pallor.

At his right temple, the thin tissue seemed to recede even further, producing a slight, uneven indentation a few inches around that seemed to almost show the bare bone of his skull. Thin red arteries and blue veins traced across it. It edged up into his hairline, and she realised with a start that his luxuriant dark hair was just a very clever wig! His right eyebrow was patchy and nearly not there at all, and she assumed that his hair – his _real_ hair – must be just as thin, patchy, and uneven as the wisps that clung to his brow.

Her gaze fell next upon his mouth. His lips were thin, uneven, and on the right side there was a bloom, a mass, of pink tissue where the upper lip fissured into a roughly vertical gap that ran nearly all the way up into the hole where his nose should have been. It was obvious that at some point he had tried to repair it, to join it together as a complete upper lip, as the pink tissue joined up near the nasal hole, and the tiny pink parallel dimples of old suture scars ran along the more normal, pale, thin skin on either side of the gap. It had not been a completely successful repair. While it was joined at the top, at the vacant hole where his nose should have been, it had only joined up for about half an inch, then parted. A couple of his teeth, a jumble of crooked dentition, were visible through the bottom of the gap.

When he spoke, made any facial expression at all, the flesh pulled and bunched oddly, creating an obscene and bumpy patchwork of unrelated tissues. It truly was a horror face. A huge cosmic mistake. A cruel divine punishment.

In that moment of silent expectation, with her former Angel's luminescent eyes closed, tears coursing from their uneven corners, Christine realised that he was still, somehow, her Angel. Fallen, of course. Damaged? Unquestionably. Cursed? Possibly. But he was still her Angel of Music, and she had fallen in love with him when he was just the Voice, the ethereal, perfect, gentle, compassionate Voice who taught her every evening, who listened intently to her petty troubles and shallow worries without judgement. She had longed for the Voice of the Angel to be a real, living man whom she could embrace, touch, hold, love. Surely, it was a sin to fall in love with an angel, but she could love a man without sullying the divine.

When he turned out to be a man... a real, living, breathing, mortal, physical man... she had been elated, nervous, shocked, fearful... and when he appeared wearing that stern, hard, black mask, she had been even more fearful. But still... she had thrilled at the touch of his gloved hands and willingly stepped into the darkness with him.

Christine pushed her chocolate curls away from her face and regarded him. She set his stern black mask onto the rug in front of her, and with her newly-free hand, she gently touched the alien topography of his face.

The moment her slender fingers came in contact with his ruined, runnelled cheek, he flinched back, away from her touch. His eyes, those oddly reflective, feline eyes, opened wide, terror in their molten depths. When he saw her hand, hovering only a few inches from his face, he stared at it. He could not comprehend, mind racing frantically. She had touched him? Touched his _face_? Touched his accursed face with her holy, pure fingers? How had she not been tainted by contact with his demonic contagion? How had she not been damaged by the mere sight of him? How was it that she was even still there, kneeling in front of him? Why had she not screamed, not run in a terrified, shocked dash up to the surface?

His eyes flicked from her hovering hand to her eyes. He sought fear and horror and shock there. Sought disgust and revulsion. Searched out pity. He did not find it. Instead, she met his gaze with gentle compassion and sweet acceptance. A small, hopeful smile curved the edges of her beloved lips upward. He stared, struck momentarily mute, as her hand advanced again, fingers lightly brushing the deceptively soft flesh of his perverse face.

When he finally regained his voice, it came out almost as a croak. "Chris…. tine?"

"Angel…" she whispered. "I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't have touched your mask. But I had to know you. It… it kept me from seeing your expressions, kept me away from you like a wall. I wanted to know you… without walls." Her eyes were soft, her touch softer, as her fingers traversed his unearthly flesh.

His terrible head bowed, his bony shoulders hunching. He turned away, so his less-damaged left side was all she could see, and only a little. It hurt her to see her proud, tall, regal Angel looking so small, so broken. Tears threatened, stinging the corners of her eyes.

"I am no angel, Christine… you know that now. I… have done horrible things… Erik is a horrible thing, Christine. Erik is nothing but an unworthy demon, playing an angel's stolen role…" His voice was but a whisper, and it dissolved into a hitching sob that shook his deceptively frail-looking body.

"Is that your name?" she asked, gently, reaching to cup his ruined right cheek with her small palm to bring his gaze back to her. "Erik?"

He nodded slightly, then shook his head. "It is the name Erik took. Erik's mother…. She hated Erik the moment Erik was born. Erik was her secret, her unspoken shame. She locked Erik away, told her family and friends that the pregnancy was a stillbirth. She did not have Erik baptised. Erik was… sold" here, his whispery voice broke again, but he carried on, "to a travelling carnival, a gypsy fair. Erik was kept in a cage, on display as a freak…" Another sob wracked his emaciated frame. "A knife finally gave Erik his freedom, and he took the name as a stage name… Erik can do many horrific and wonderful things, you know… Erik is a magician, a ventriloquist… and you know already about the music…" He trailed off.

It was one of the longest speeches he had ever made to Christine, and it was certainly the most heart breaking. How could a mother hate her own child so much that she literally willed him dead? How could she be so cruel as to lock a child who was as obviously bright as he had to have been away in solitude, and then sell him into degrading slavery as a caged freak? She could not keep her tears from flowing, tears for him and all the injustices he had endured. She knew that there had to be more, just based on his secretiveness, how long it took him to reveal himself as a mortal man, how – even as her angel – he had been uncertain of her fondness for him, even when she told him directly how much she appreciated his tutelage, his patience, his gentle and non-judging friendship. Now, she understood. Of course he could not believe anyone could like him, could want him around. No one ever had, unless it was to exploit his appearance or talents for their own gain. Her poor Angel!

Once again, she took his horrible cheek into her warm palm, drawing his face up to meet her own. He looked shocked, and exhausted. That exhaustion was obvious in the slate-grey circles around his deep-set eyes, the jaundiced cast to his sickly pallor, the involuntary stoop of his bony shoulders. He couldn't take another rejection, and she knew it.

So she gently placed her warm, full lips against his cool, thin ones and kissed him.

A moment. Silence. He was completely still. She could hear no rustle of fabric that might tell of motion. His lips were still beneath hers, and his breath was being held. Her eyes, closed for the kiss, gave her no information at all. She used his stillness as a chance to gently embrace him, gently curling her arms around his shoulders.

She felt his left hand lift to gently stroke the curls just above her ear. Then, his lips began to move beneath hers, sending little thrills running along her spine, little electric tingles into her scalp. She felt him breathe again. Felt his long fingers tangle themselves into the thick curls on the back of her head.

Christine smiled against his lips, still not daring to open her eyes. A delightfully wicked idea had entered into her mind, based on the constant topics of ballet girl conversation. They always talked of men (mostly imaginary, she had figured out) and of kissing, courting, and eventually sex. Most of their information sounded absolutely incorrect, even somewhat repulsive (the man puts *what*, *where*?! Does he not… urinate out of that? Ew!), but there was one topic she had listened intently to whenever it had come up in conversation. Kissing. Especially the much more… forward, improper, exhilarating ' _baiser Florentin_ ', the wondrous ' _baiser amoureux_ ', the passionate ' _baiser avec la_ _langue_ '.

So she dared. She flicked her tongue quickly and deftly against the uneven territory of his upper lip and felt him flinch, start to pull away in shock. She heard, and felt, his abrupt, surprised inhale, and refused to let his bony body retreat from her own much softer one. A moment of absolute, breath-held stillness. And then, very gently, tentatively, tenderly, she felt his tongue explore her own upper lip.

He tasted of smoky brandy, of mellow coffee. His scent was nearly intoxicating, so very close to him. Spices, exotic and unusual. Woodsmoke from his fireplaces. Hot candle wax. The slight mustiness of his underground home. Soap and some sort of lightly masculine cologne. He smelled clean, exotic, and undeniably male. She had never thought that it was possible to love a person's unique scent before. It had never occurred to her. None of the other chorus girls or dancers had ever mentioned it in her hearing, though she was now certain they had to have talked of the effect. It was too intoxicating not to have! And amazingly, she could feel his chest expanding and contracting against her arms with his own deep breaths, and she was suddenly sure that he was doing the very same thing as she was, inhaling her scent, becoming almost drunk on the textures, and smells of her hair, her soaps, her light perfume.

She could taste salt on his lips now, and that was the only clue she had, initially, that he was silently, gently weeping. As soon as she became aware, she pulled gently away, just enough to allow her to see him.

When she did, his eyes opened and regarded her. They were no longer the unearthly, yellow, cat-like eyes of the being that others around the Opera called 'Phantom', nor were they the all-seeing, patient eyes of her angelic tutor. No. These eyes were the wounded, exhausted, over-wrought, and adoring eyes of a living man. A very damaged living man. A living man who needed her more than she had ever been needed before.

She smiled. His sparse brow quirked in an expression of shocked query that somehow struck her as oddly adorable, despite the twisted features that formed it. Not giving herself the chance for second thoughts, she leaned forward again and placed a gentle, sweet kiss to the right corner of his mouth.

He inhaled sharply.

"I must be dreaming…" he whispered. "Dreaming, or dead… but no." He raised his hand to gently brush Christine's curls away from her face, staring at her as if in disbelief. "If Erik were dead, he would be in hell… and this is heaven. No place for Erik. So Erik must be dreaming…" Another tear meandered its uneven, unmapped path down his strange cheek, and impulsively, Christine gently wiped it away.

"Erik isn't dreaming. This truly is real", she whispered back.


End file.
